Join us for a chat on French with our guest Julie Barlow, a writer,
journalist, and speaker from Montreal, Canada. She and her husband
Jean-Benoet Nadeau, are authors of "The Story of French" and the
earlier "Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong".

I'm an Australian who has been visiting Texas for the last four weeks and
have found that haplology is rife here. Sometimes I have no trouble working
out what's being said - "uncomforble" is easy - but other times it's not so
clear. It took three repetitions before I realised that "code" was actually
"cold".

Haplography is a word that I know well because I am involved in Biblical
studies. In copying biblical texts, there are examples in which whole lines
or sentences have been omitted -- very easy to do if your attention gets
distracted from copying from a manuscript that has no spaces between words,
no upper and lower case letters, and no punctuation. The writers of ancient
manuscripts just kept copying letters until they got to the end of the line
and then put the next letter at the beginning of the next line, regardless of
whether it came at the beginning, middle, or end of a word!

The Brits are especially good at haplography. They pronounce Cholmondeley
as Chumley, and we often say Rockafella or Rockerfellar for Rockefeller.

A Cockney chap visited America and was greatly impressed with Niagara Falls.
He was relating his visit to a friend who seemed a bit confused, but then
blurted out, "Ow, me lad, I think you mean Niffles!"

Then there's Bucknum Palace for Buckingham Palace, and Indja for India.

Although in the past half of my life I was familiar with Huckleberry rafting
on the Mississippi, now the next half or so is familiar with Woolloomooloo
(east of the Opera House in Sydney). Either way of haplography or dittography,
it catches thousands in a cast on the Internet.

A young monk, new to the monastery, noticed that the scribes were copying
the scriptures from copies, not originals. He expressed his concern to the
abbot that any mistakes in the copies would be passed on, and the scriptures
would become corrupted. The abbot replied that this is the way it had always
been done but the point was valid, and he would check it out. He descended
into the vaults to look over the originals, and he was gone a long time.
With some concern, the young monk went looking for him and found him sobbing
with abandon, his tears pouring upon his frock. "What is the matter, my good
abbot?" asked the monk, to which the abbot choked out, "In the original,
the word was 'celebrate'!"

One of the recurring elements of the popular musical "Joseph and the
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" is a chorus detailing the colors of
Joseph's many-colored coat. It includes an excellent example of how both
asyndeton and polysyndeton can be put to powerful use.

As the chorus revisits the colors in different places through the show,
it varies between asyndeton ("It was red, yellow, pink, orange, ochre,
peach, chocolate, mauve..."), and polsyndeton ("It was red and yellow and
pink and orange and blue!"). Sometimes both are combined, as different
groups within the chorus are split between the two. Together, these
techniques make for one of the most powerful musical moments I've ever
experienced in musical theater.

Here is one of life's little ironies: I have delighted in languages
since I was a child, and I even have a Ph.D. in linguistics. One of the
things I had most looked forward to in becoming a mother was seeing my
child's expressive language develop. As it happens, my five-year-old
son is autistic and has minimal expressive language. (Fortunately, his
receptive abilities far exceed his expressive abilities.) He does
engage in some delayed (often functional) echolalia, but he also
repeats what appear to be nonsense syllables. (Although, with his poor
articulation, it might be that he is trying to say something that I
simply am not "catching".) I am thrilled to find that there is a word
to describe what he is doing. I'll have to try "verbigerate" out on his
speech therapist to see if she knows it.

As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone
sound like a butler. -Calvin Trillin, writer (1935- )